Top Home Care Trends For 2024

Home Health Care News | By Andrew Donlan
 
The rising costs of home care were a trend in 2022 and 2023. They will remain one in 2024, and could finally come to a head. 
 
That’s only one trend, of many, that will impact home care providers in the new year. 
But it alone will also lead to other trends, such as increased M&A, adoption of future-facing technologies like AI, and further investment in tangential service lines and alternative payer sources outside of private pay. 
 
Below are all of the home care trends HHCN believes should be on providers’ radar in 2024.
Curious what we predicted for last year? Revisit our 2023 trends here.
 
Client retention, length of stay will become a major issue 
 
Home care providers are regularly seeing the costs of providing home care services rise. With that, billing rates are also rising for Americans in need of care. 
 
Over the past few years, those rates have risen anywhere from 20% to 40% – and sometimes more – based on the market. The most wealthy Americans will still pay for the hours they need, or their family members need. 
 
But less well-off families will begin to look elsewhere for care, or at least cut down the hours of home care they’re willing to pay for. 
 
Only 14% of American seniors can afford to pay for home care out of pocket, according to a recent analysis conducted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Again, based on the market, that number can dip far lower. 
 
For home care providers primarily dealing in private pay, this will create burdensome volatility and unpredictability for their businesses. Those long-term clients that make the whole ship sail may be no longer, or at least few and far between. 
 
“If anything goes wrong in the home, they’re canceling services,” Daniel Gottschalk, the co-CEO of Family Tree Private Care, told HHCN in December. “They’re going to find alternative options.”
That could affect retention, too. Caregivers that don’t have steady schedules or steady clients may jump ship, looking for more sustainable work elsewhere. 
 
Home care providers will continue to diversify, whether that be in Medicaid or Medicare Advantage
 
Providers will react in a few ways to shortened client length of stays and rising costs. 
First, they will do what they can to keep rates down. 
 
“[Cost of care] has really increased,” The LTM Group CEO David Kerns told HHCN, referring to his company’s private-pay business in October. “But we’ve tried not to increase prices too much, just because you have to be hyper-aware of that access to care.”
 
Eventually, that will no longer be a viable option, however. Home care providers – in addition to making the aforementioned investments into operational efficiency – will either become companies tailored to the uber wealthy or, alternatively, look to diversify their businesses…

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